I've never even come close to getting a car towed since back when I owned a 10 year old Caravan. I now drive Toyotas that I get new or with less than 30k miles, so they're still under factory warranty for at least 6k miles. When our old Camry (with partly broken radio/CD, old muffler and tires, broken axle boot) got to 170k miles, it started hinting at engine problem. Rather than fixing it and hoping for the best, we traded it in for a new corolla right away. We got $4k in trade for the 10 year old car. If it had been a similar 'american' car, it would have been $500 in trade... as a goodwill gesture.
Even if I buy a toyota new, I can still resell it quickly for at least $500 under invoice if I have to. GM, Ford and Chrysler depreciate 25-35% right away because any savvy buyer knows that they're very overpriced to begin with and the price will be slashed massively at the end of the season. Even if you can't get a better price now, you are guaranteed that it will kill your resale value in 6 month. You won't see toyota running sales like buyonegetonefree or $10k in rebates.
I really don't think you're talking about the difference between buying a new car VS slightly used, though. You seemed to imply a car with a $3k price tag, putting you into a 7 year old 'american' car, or a 15 year old Toyota or Honda (or a 4 year old KIA;) ).
My personal experience has been that a fully loaded 2 year old Toyota represents the best car value. You're never 'inverted' in your loan by more than $1k, and aside from collisions and oil changes, you should make it to 120k miles with only about $2k in maintenance and repairs (timing belt, tires, plugs, muffler included).
I totally understand getting a beater for students or people on tight budgets. Anyone close to america's median income should be steering clear of them, though. Anyone who wants to look like a good provider/spouse (even if you're just trying to get laid) should forget about beaters.
The problem is that most computers that sell for $300 only represent a $5 profit to the manufacturer. Adding $5 to their already razor thin margins can mean they make nothing.
If you want a Ferrari, don't buy a KIA and complain about the shitty performance. If you want components that are compatible with 20 different OSes on top of the latest 5 from MS, you are going to pay extra for it. If you have to spend $50 extra to get a DVD burner with linux drivers and software, buy it. Then send a letter to the company thanking them for supporting linux. Maybe they'll notice and add linux support to their cheaper products later.
Part of the reason linux support is so patchy is that many linux boxes are scrounged from windows boxes. Very few people buy new parts to build a linux box, so linux support isn't an issue when there's actual cash involved. Let me put it another way. 20gig larger hard drive, or linux support for every component in the machine. Which would most people prefer?
I expect 5 years of faithful service and require a vehicle that can be driven on 300-1000 mile round trips with no worries whatsoever. For my wife, showing up to work late because of the car breaking down is not an option. It's the kind of thing that could keep her from getting promoted. 'Looks shinier' is the least of our concerns. Plus, car shopping is a time consuming pain in the ass, and certainly not something I would like to do every year.
My wife and I have about $300K in unsecured debt and still managed to get a $0 down mortgage. You have to botch up your credit rating pretty bad to not qualify for $0 down nowadays.
And I'm sick of people bitching about expensive housing anywhere. Either your job skills earn you enough to justify having to buy a house there, or you should move somewhere that you can afford. I have a 3 BR, 2.5 BA, 2 car single family home in a good neighborhood 10 miles north of the center of kansas city for only 126k. I'm thinking of moving back to Iowa City, IA because there are *NEW* 3000+ SQFT homes nearby for $225k with 5 bedrooms, 3BA, 3 car garage, on half an acre overlooking a lake. For an extra $40k, you get the 1200 SQFT walkout basement finished fully finished into a rec room, home theater and spare bedroom or office. McDonalds there starts your teens at $9/hour. Adult jobs pay a lot more.
Idiots dumb enough to buy a house they can't afford in Hawaii, NYC, Vegas, Sillicon Valley or wherever get no sympathy from me. If you must live in your version of paradise (DC metro, dude WTF???), don't bitch about the cost.
Yes, all true, but there are things that take points away like living in Mom's basement, having pasty white skin, and living off of caffeine and doritos.
If you live in your parent's basement (and you're past college age), you're a loser. Being a nerd/geek is not your problem.
If she meets your parents before you you first kiss her, it's going to be much harder make a good impression. Would you date a girl that would likely require you to move into her 12x10 bedroom with cinderella sheets, n'sync posters, barbies on the shelves and her nutty parents across the hallway? How she looks and acts would barely come into play.
Your volume of spam is mostly related to how much you scatter it around in public forums or websites. The easier it is for spammers to find it, the more spam you will get. I suspect that Gates has quite a few e-mail addresses, which directly increases your spam volume. Some spammers use his address as the from line, so he may be counting the thousands of bounced e-mails in the stats. I make unique address to give to businesses, and I've found that very few big companies sell your e-mail address to other marketers. I've never had a company sell my e-mail address to mass spammers, but there have been a few small incidences. A big chip company got my e-mail address from a PC parts seller; stuff like that.
I wouldn't be surprised if spammers were collecting e-mail addresses via e-mail viruses. I had an e-mail address that I never posted anywhere and got ZERO spam, but after a heavy wave of viruses went around I suddenly started getting lots of spam on that address. Many spammers also spam the entire dictionary and all names at the most common ISPs (i.e. truck@bigisp.com). I'm close to telling everyone to put the current year in front of the @ and filtering any older addresses as spam. I own my own domain, so it's a bit more convienent for me to do.
More like gallon jugs. Ink costs alot less than the usual $20+/oz when you're buying printers that cost thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars. I think this technology won't ever make it to home consumer printers. Could you imagine having to prime 10 cubic inches of print head to run off a single photo?
There's a cheaper version of my printer that uses the same cartridges as mine. It retails for $100, just $18 more than the full set of cartridges that come with it. A full set of generic cartridges cost $20. I'll be buying some generics and a cheap printer to do some quality testing on the generic inks. Even if it's not worth doing photos on, it will certainly be fine for my more mundane color needs (maps, flyers, web pages, etc).
Re:Geek persecution for a reason maybe?
on
Tokyo's Geek Ghetto
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I mean really wanting women to dress up in anime costumes? Give me a break. This is not remotely healthy.
Here in the USA, we have restaurants where women are paid to dress up in tiny orange shorts, white tank tops, sneakers and pantyhose. A while back there were clubs with women in satin bustiers, hose, high heels and rabbit ears that catered to the wealthiest businessmen. The servers in many casinos wear skin-tastic outfits that aren't remotely grounded in typical dress standards.
The shut-in part is certainly an unhealthy lifestyle, but there's nothing particularly odd about enjoying waitresses in 'fetish' costumes, particularly when common denominator is lots of exposed skin.
The systems on themarket designed for low power (trmansmeta, et al) are desiged for minimal power, at the great expense of cpu horsepower. The article is more about building a system with the greatest possible horsepower without needing noisy or failure prone cooling methods. Perhaps you want a fast computer that's going to go into your bedroom or home theater, where noise is an issue (my TIVO keeps me awake at night sometimes, so I can sympathize).
Many/.ers have entioned that you should just buy a lower speed CPU. This doesn't work, because often a cheaper, slower CPU (from an older core) uses just as much power as the faster, newer ones. An athlon 4000+ dropped to 3000+ may use a lot less power (and geerate less heat) than a stock athlon 3000+. You can stick a fanless CPU cooler on the processor and a single 2000 rpm exhaust fan on the back. Viola, quiet computer, and less fans ready to die and bring down a mission critical system.
I used to have an underclocked PC acting as a router and currently have another that is used as an internet guest machine or for bittorrent downloading and hosting. They're old hardware and it's worth cutting down the speed by about 1/3 so I can remove the fans. I have to turn on the monitor to check if the machine is actually running. I save electricity costs, and I'm not adding to an already noisy room.
The 3D benchmarks seem a bit retarded though. If you're gaming, you should have the sound turned up enough to cover fan noise.
6 years ago, PC gamers were shaking in fear. "If $300 will buy you an 800mhz Pentium 3 with a geforce 3+ equivalent GPU, who will ever play PC games again?!?" Then the consoles were actually released, and geforce 3s had already dropped down to the $200 range. The games out on the consoles at launch were sparse, and didn't take full advantage of the hardware.
Developers wouldn't understand how to efficiently code for these next-gen consoles until about 2002.
The PC game market dried up badly while everyone shifted to working on console games for these two years.
Fast forward to 2003-4. PCs have Radeon 9800s and Geforce 5600s. They commonly have 128MB vid ram and 512 MB ram. They laugh at the 6MB hard drive of the XBox.
HL2, Doom3, Call of Duty, Far Cry, Dungeon Siege, KotOR, etc. come out and put console games to shame.
2005 rolls around and PC gamers are in fear again. "I'll have to buy a dual core CPU and two radeon X850s to be on par with a $300 console?!?"
Maybe not in time for Xbox360, but certainly by the time PS3 comes out I plan to buy a dual core PC anyway. I'll probably only get a 'lower end' X800 to go with it, and it'll probably only cost about $150-200. That should only put me just behind the current consoles. By 2008-9, I expect my computer to again be trouncing the hell out of the current consoles with my 4GB ram, 1TB hard drive('please insert DVD 3 to continue installing...'), quad 3.5 GHZ Athlon, and 8 core radeon 11 series. Perhaps most games will finally take advantage of my dual monitors that I'll have had for nearly a decade (dual or triple widescreen FPS anyone?).
Until new consoles come out every 3 years instead of 5-6, PCs will continue to be a staple of video gaming. PS2 and Xbox have been horribly obsolete for the past year at least. The only other option until the end of 2005 (at least) is my PC.
A few side notes:
Nobody ever factors in the extra money paid for addons like extra controllers (that you have to rebuy because they make the plugs incompatible).
I've still never seen an Xbox or PS2 actually do something that looks even close to what they did in their pre-release tech demos.
Nintendo would be geniuses if they secretly developed a superior console and released it in 2008.
You don't understand color bit depth
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Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
You are horribly misinformed about color bit depths. They are rated per pixel, not per pixel color element. You seem to think that 32bit color is 32bits for red, 32bits for green and 32 bits for blue. It's actually 32 bits total for all 3 colors combined.
6 bit color = 64 colors.
8 bit color = 256 colors.
16 bit color = 65,536 colors.
24 bit = 16,777,216 colors.
32 bit = 4,294,967,296 colors.
24 bit color is roughly the limit that the human eye can see. Bit depths above that are used for high contrast image manipulation. i.e. Photographing an ocean sunset and preserving full detail in both the water and sky simultaneously so you can later create an image that shows both clearly, or properly rendering dark scenes with bright windows.
Combo-ing their Area-51 alien styled case (which is getting old) with Star Wars graphics seems quite bastardizing. Like washing down chocolate with orange juice. You can certainly argue that either one is very cool, but they just don't go together.
As a side note, I've always considered the alienware cases to be very cheap and flimsy feeling, in addition to the cheesy look. I'd much rather have one of the Falcon Northwest cases with a nice paint job. Either way, it seems like you can build two mundane looking machines for the price of one of their pimped out boxes with the same specs. And that trumps it for me.
I think the driving force behind the flood of new Firefox users hasn't been less about features and more about security. There was a major flood about IE security holes all classified as severe problems and MS didn't have any fix for them. Lots of news outlets were recommending that people 'upgrade' their IE to Firefox.
If someone needs an office suite, they probably already have MS Office. Dropping that investment and switching to OO is a step back in the short run.
This is just another testament to MS's monopoly and marketing power. The competing FREE software to their $x00 product has to be completely superior for more than 10% of people to use it.
I'm not sure which is more confusing, that Microsoft would champion gay rights, or that they could be pressured by a local church. Where's the connection?
Any mention of how sellers get paid? Are we talking paypal, or is SOE just going to credit your monthly account? There's no mention of transaction fees either.
I had no idea of just how much work they had to do because of dishonest players.
At times, having a canadian $1 coin has been alot more like having a US 50c coin. The canadian $2 coin was introduced around the same time as the US $1 coin, which is appropriate.
I imagine if the canadian government had left the $2 bills in circulation, they would still be preferred by the people.
They can't sell it online for less without getting sued. Anti-trust laws prevent manufacturers from selling their own products for less than the MSRP that they set for the item. The only way around this is to be the only entity selling the particular item. So they could slash the price as much as they want, but they would be unable to sell through retailers.
It could be argued that the dead tree product is different from the downloaded version, but I doubt a judge would see it that way. Especially since the game makers have argued for so long that you are licensing content, not buying media.
As many others have noted, the datasets are often several years old. I was interested in using this service to check out new construction areas since I'm looking to buy a new home. Unfortunately, these areas didn't even have roads a few years back, so the google images don't remotely resemble current reality.
When you print out a map, it doesn't fill the page the way it adjusts to fills your screen.
There's NO SCALE!!! Holy Shite, what kind of map doesn't indicate the scale somewhere?
You can't (easily) save the images as gif/jpg.
The sattelite maps are commonly misaligned by 50-100 feet.
It's insanely impressive for a new beta product though. They've already replaced mapquest as my favorite directions/maps site.
Allow me to make a small comparison to a more appropriate profession (rather than actors): comedians. Even with a good manager, most decent comedians travel all over and rarely clear more than 50k in a good year. Great comedians will pack the house and make a few million per year. Jeff Foxworthy has managed very broad appeal and cleared tens of millions. Does this mean that you should turn in your bar card or MD to get the phat pay? Hell no. Most comedians barely make enough to keep the rent paid on their trailer home and the fridge stocked with beer. If comedy had solid $50k+ entry level positions, everybody would do it. It's not P2P that killed it either. It's just that if acting, singing or joking paid any more, everyone would want to do it.
Almost anyone wants to be a successful performer (star). Unfortunately the unsuccessful ones usually refuse to accept it and move on. I've checked out the websites of tons of groups that bitch about not being able to get contracts or gigs, or they claim people won't pay for their CDs because of P2P, but ever one of them has sucked. A few had great sound, but their singer was tone deaf. Or the occasional cool lead, but the guy on keyboards couldn't keep a beat. Many ruined their audio by apparently putting a pillow over their microphones. I wouldn't be surprised if they were ugly or geeky looking too. I'm sure they've all been rejected hundreds of times, but they won't accept that they suck until they're dead broke and begging their parents for money to supplement their income from McDonalds.
actors..they make large amounts of money..and may of them are un-educated
Perhaps my impressions are wrong, but I always thought that most actors over 22 have not only graduated high school, but also college or an acting school. The SAG mandates that underage actors are required to spend about 5 hours a day with a teacher while on projects. OTOH, musicians tend to drop out of high school to start a band, and almost never go on to college. However, like musicians, most actors make nothing. L.A. is brimming over with aspiring actors waiting tables. Most who do work are only working a few months of the year. There are tons of small play houses across the US with 20-30 actors making either nothing (they do it because they enjoy performing) or just enough that their 14 hour acting days just barely make up for their regular 8 hour days as say, a substitute teacher.
There is not, and has never been, any real money in the performing arts. You may think that you deserve the mad Britney Spears money, but the only person who deserves cash for that is the guy with the magic wand who fished her out of the trailer park and made her popular. You probably suck. You couldn't hit the top 1000 spot on the charts. You definately couldn't hit the break even 100 spot. Go to college and become and engineer or a doctor like your momma told you to. Then, if you still miss music, go find a karaoke bar. Join the church choir. Sing at your friend's wedding. You've got a fun hobby, now get a job.
Don't you already know that RIAA musicians don't make money from their CD sales? Yes, they get a contract that fronts (loans) them $100-200k for expenses to record it, but then they get sent to the RIAA's own recording studio that charges $10k/day to record the songs. Then they bill the artist for advertising. Then they mail out thousands of copies of the CD to promote it and bill the artist for the wholesale price. If you get big enough to warrant a music video, they pay for it and charge it to your account. The only way you keep any money is if your album goes multi platinum, or if your studio costs are less than what you get fronted AND you never make another album.
The only way you'll make money is in touring. Even then, the venue eats alot of the profits. Either they take half of ticket sales, or they get all the merchandising.
Most musicians should count themselves very lucky if they can ever clear 6 figures per year. Hell, if I had no college (or even high school in a lot of cases) degree and spent years playing my guitar in my mom's garage, I'd thank god just to be able to make 30k a year. It pains me the way that drummers and guitar players think they deserve to make as much as the CEO of a small, but highly successful company. If uneducated musicians consistently made good money, then everyone would be a musician. Even doped-up, STD-riddled, ugly-ass musicians get laid. They should be paid well too?!?
Naw, they were pricing it there at their regular $19.99. I double checked walmart.com later and it was still listed at the sale price. Having never lived in any area with less than 150k people in the immediate area, I never understood why small town folks hate walmart so much. I now know the full extent of how far they go to drive existing businesses under and then jack up prices over what people probably paid before. Walmart could be a model for efficient one-stop (and self checkout!) shopping, but their monopolistic price gouging strategies are vile.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/netw orking/story/0,10801,102635,00.html?source=x10
So when a NIC is made for linux first, this is how much is costs.
FPS gamers are used to the scrolling function for switching between weapons. I doubt the scrollpad will be very useful for this function.
I've never even come close to getting a car towed since back when I owned a 10 year old Caravan. I now drive Toyotas that I get new or with less than 30k miles, so they're still under factory warranty for at least 6k miles. When our old Camry (with partly broken radio/CD, old muffler and tires, broken axle boot) got to 170k miles, it started hinting at engine problem. Rather than fixing it and hoping for the best, we traded it in for a new corolla right away. We got $4k in trade for the 10 year old car. If it had been a similar 'american' car, it would have been $500 in trade... as a goodwill gesture.
;) ).
Even if I buy a toyota new, I can still resell it quickly for at least $500 under invoice if I have to. GM, Ford and Chrysler depreciate 25-35% right away because any savvy buyer knows that they're very overpriced to begin with and the price will be slashed massively at the end of the season. Even if you can't get a better price now, you are guaranteed that it will kill your resale value in 6 month. You won't see toyota running sales like buyonegetonefree or $10k in rebates.
I really don't think you're talking about the difference between buying a new car VS slightly used, though. You seemed to imply a car with a $3k price tag, putting you into a 7 year old 'american' car, or a 15 year old Toyota or Honda (or a 4 year old KIA
My personal experience has been that a fully loaded 2 year old Toyota represents the best car value. You're never 'inverted' in your loan by more than $1k, and aside from collisions and oil changes, you should make it to 120k miles with only about $2k in maintenance and repairs (timing belt, tires, plugs, muffler included).
I totally understand getting a beater for students or people on tight budgets. Anyone close to america's median income should be steering clear of them, though. Anyone who wants to look like a good provider/spouse (even if you're just trying to get laid) should forget about beaters.
The problem is that most computers that sell for $300 only represent a $5 profit to the manufacturer. Adding $5 to their already razor thin margins can mean they make nothing.
If you want a Ferrari, don't buy a KIA and complain about the shitty performance. If you want components that are compatible with 20 different OSes on top of the latest 5 from MS, you are going to pay extra for it. If you have to spend $50 extra to get a DVD burner with linux drivers and software, buy it. Then send a letter to the company thanking them for supporting linux. Maybe they'll notice and add linux support to their cheaper products later.
Part of the reason linux support is so patchy is that many linux boxes are scrounged from windows boxes. Very few people buy new parts to build a linux box, so linux support isn't an issue when there's actual cash involved. Let me put it another way. 20gig larger hard drive, or linux support for every component in the machine. Which would most people prefer?
I expect 5 years of faithful service and require a vehicle that can be driven on 300-1000 mile round trips with no worries whatsoever. For my wife, showing up to work late because of the car breaking down is not an option. It's the kind of thing that could keep her from getting promoted. 'Looks shinier' is the least of our concerns. Plus, car shopping is a time consuming pain in the ass, and certainly not something I would like to do every year.
My wife and I have about $300K in unsecured debt and still managed to get a $0 down mortgage. You have to botch up your credit rating pretty bad to not qualify for $0 down nowadays.
And I'm sick of people bitching about expensive housing anywhere. Either your job skills earn you enough to justify having to buy a house there, or you should move somewhere that you can afford. I have a 3 BR, 2.5 BA, 2 car single family home in a good neighborhood 10 miles north of the center of kansas city for only 126k. I'm thinking of moving back to Iowa City, IA because there are *NEW* 3000+ SQFT homes nearby for $225k with 5 bedrooms, 3BA, 3 car garage, on half an acre overlooking a lake. For an extra $40k, you get the 1200 SQFT walkout basement finished fully finished into a rec room, home theater and spare bedroom or office. McDonalds there starts your teens at $9/hour. Adult jobs pay a lot more.
Idiots dumb enough to buy a house they can't afford in Hawaii, NYC, Vegas, Sillicon Valley or wherever get no sympathy from me. If you must live in your version of paradise (DC metro, dude WTF???), don't bitch about the cost.
Yes, all true, but there are things that take points away like living in Mom's basement, having pasty white skin, and living off of caffeine and doritos.
If you live in your parent's basement (and you're past college age), you're a loser. Being a nerd/geek is not your problem.
If she meets your parents before you you first kiss her, it's going to be much harder make a good impression. Would you date a girl that would likely require you to move into her 12x10 bedroom with cinderella sheets, n'sync posters, barbies on the shelves and her nutty parents across the hallway? How she looks and acts would barely come into play.
Your volume of spam is mostly related to how much you scatter it around in public forums or websites. The easier it is for spammers to find it, the more spam you will get. I suspect that Gates has quite a few e-mail addresses, which directly increases your spam volume. Some spammers use his address as the from line, so he may be counting the thousands of bounced e-mails in the stats. I make unique address to give to businesses, and I've found that very few big companies sell your e-mail address to other marketers. I've never had a company sell my e-mail address to mass spammers, but there have been a few small incidences. A big chip company got my e-mail address from a PC parts seller; stuff like that.
I wouldn't be surprised if spammers were collecting e-mail addresses via e-mail viruses. I had an e-mail address that I never posted anywhere and got ZERO spam, but after a heavy wave of viruses went around I suddenly started getting lots of spam on that address. Many spammers also spam the entire dictionary and all names at the most common ISPs (i.e. truck@bigisp.com). I'm close to telling everyone to put the current year in front of the @ and filtering any older addresses as spam. I own my own domain, so it's a bit more convienent for me to do.
More like gallon jugs. Ink costs alot less than the usual $20+/oz when you're buying printers that cost thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars. I think this technology won't ever make it to home consumer printers. Could you imagine having to prime 10 cubic inches of print head to run off a single photo?
There's a cheaper version of my printer that uses the same cartridges as mine. It retails for $100, just $18 more than the full set of cartridges that come with it. A full set of generic cartridges cost $20. I'll be buying some generics and a cheap printer to do some quality testing on the generic inks. Even if it's not worth doing photos on, it will certainly be fine for my more mundane color needs (maps, flyers, web pages, etc).
I mean really wanting women to dress up in anime costumes? Give me a break. This is not remotely healthy.
Here in the USA, we have restaurants where women are paid to dress up in tiny orange shorts, white tank tops, sneakers and pantyhose. A while back there were clubs with women in satin bustiers, hose, high heels and rabbit ears that catered to the wealthiest businessmen. The servers in many casinos wear skin-tastic outfits that aren't remotely grounded in typical dress standards.
The shut-in part is certainly an unhealthy lifestyle, but there's nothing particularly odd about enjoying waitresses in 'fetish' costumes, particularly when common denominator is lots of exposed skin.
The systems on themarket designed for low power (trmansmeta, et al) are desiged for minimal power, at the great expense of cpu horsepower. The article is more about building a system with the greatest possible horsepower without needing noisy or failure prone cooling methods. Perhaps you want a fast computer that's going to go into your bedroom or home theater, where noise is an issue (my TIVO keeps me awake at night sometimes, so I can sympathize).
/.ers have entioned that you should just buy a lower speed CPU. This doesn't work, because often a cheaper, slower CPU (from an older core) uses just as much power as the faster, newer ones. An athlon 4000+ dropped to 3000+ may use a lot less power (and geerate less heat) than a stock athlon 3000+. You can stick a fanless CPU cooler on the processor and a single 2000 rpm exhaust fan on the back. Viola, quiet computer, and less fans ready to die and bring down a mission critical system.
Many
I used to have an underclocked PC acting as a router and currently have another that is used as an internet guest machine or for bittorrent downloading and hosting. They're old hardware and it's worth cutting down the speed by about 1/3 so I can remove the fans. I have to turn on the monitor to check if the machine is actually running. I save electricity costs, and I'm not adding to an already noisy room.
The 3D benchmarks seem a bit retarded though. If you're gaming, you should have the sound turned up enough to cover fan noise.
6 years ago, PC gamers were shaking in fear. "If $300 will buy you an 800mhz Pentium 3 with a geforce 3+ equivalent GPU, who will ever play PC games again?!?" Then the consoles were actually released, and geforce 3s had already dropped down to the $200 range. The games out on the consoles at launch were sparse, and didn't take full advantage of the hardware. Developers wouldn't understand how to efficiently code for these next-gen consoles until about 2002. The PC game market dried up badly while everyone shifted to working on console games for these two years.
Fast forward to 2003-4. PCs have Radeon 9800s and Geforce 5600s. They commonly have 128MB vid ram and 512 MB ram. They laugh at the 6MB hard drive of the XBox. HL2, Doom3, Call of Duty, Far Cry, Dungeon Siege, KotOR, etc. come out and put console games to shame.
2005 rolls around and PC gamers are in fear again. "I'll have to buy a dual core CPU and two radeon X850s to be on par with a $300 console?!?"
Maybe not in time for Xbox360, but certainly by the time PS3 comes out I plan to buy a dual core PC anyway. I'll probably only get a 'lower end' X800 to go with it, and it'll probably only cost about $150-200. That should only put me just behind the current consoles. By 2008-9, I expect my computer to again be trouncing the hell out of the current consoles with my 4GB ram, 1TB hard drive('please insert DVD 3 to continue installing...'), quad 3.5 GHZ Athlon, and 8 core radeon 11 series. Perhaps most games will finally take advantage of my dual monitors that I'll have had for nearly a decade (dual or triple widescreen FPS anyone?).
Until new consoles come out every 3 years instead of 5-6, PCs will continue to be a staple of video gaming. PS2 and Xbox have been horribly obsolete for the past year at least. The only other option until the end of 2005 (at least) is my PC.
A few side notes:
Nobody ever factors in the extra money paid for addons like extra controllers (that you have to rebuy because they make the plugs incompatible).
I've still never seen an Xbox or PS2 actually do something that looks even close to what they did in their pre-release tech demos.
Nintendo would be geniuses if they secretly developed a superior console and released it in 2008.
You are horribly misinformed about color bit depths. They are rated per pixel, not per pixel color element. You seem to think that 32bit color is 32bits for red, 32bits for green and 32 bits for blue. It's actually 32 bits total for all 3 colors combined.
6 bit color = 64 colors.
8 bit color = 256 colors.
16 bit color = 65,536 colors.
24 bit = 16,777,216 colors.
32 bit = 4,294,967,296 colors.
24 bit color is roughly the limit that the human eye can see. Bit depths above that are used for high contrast image manipulation. i.e. Photographing an ocean sunset and preserving full detail in both the water and sky simultaneously so you can later create an image that shows both clearly, or properly rendering dark scenes with bright windows.
Aren't laptops full of p-n junctions that could get disrupted by this. Radiation is horribly damaging to microchips.
And I don't care how small the reactor is, why would you want a radioactive source near your nuts for prolonged periods of time?
I prefer to call them 'nut roasters'.
Combo-ing their Area-51 alien styled case (which is getting old) with Star Wars graphics seems quite bastardizing. Like washing down chocolate with orange juice. You can certainly argue that either one is very cool, but they just don't go together.
As a side note, I've always considered the alienware cases to be very cheap and flimsy feeling, in addition to the cheesy look. I'd much rather have one of the Falcon Northwest cases with a nice paint job. Either way, it seems like you can build two mundane looking machines for the price of one of their pimped out boxes with the same specs. And that trumps it for me.
I think the driving force behind the flood of new Firefox users hasn't been less about features and more about security. There was a major flood about IE security holes all classified as severe problems and MS didn't have any fix for them. Lots of news outlets were recommending that people 'upgrade' their IE to Firefox.
If someone needs an office suite, they probably already have MS Office. Dropping that investment and switching to OO is a step back in the short run.
This is just another testament to MS's monopoly and marketing power. The competing FREE software to their $x00 product has to be completely superior for more than 10% of people to use it.
I'm not sure which is more confusing, that Microsoft would champion gay rights, or that they could be pressured by a local church. Where's the connection?
Any mention of how sellers get paid? Are we talking paypal, or is SOE just going to credit your monthly account? There's no mention of transaction fees either.
I had no idea of just how much work they had to do because of dishonest players.
At times, having a canadian $1 coin has been alot more like having a US 50c coin. The canadian $2 coin was introduced around the same time as the US $1 coin, which is appropriate.
I imagine if the canadian government had left the $2 bills in circulation, they would still be preferred by the people.
They can't sell it online for less without getting sued. Anti-trust laws prevent manufacturers from selling their own products for less than the MSRP that they set for the item. The only way around this is to be the only entity selling the particular item. So they could slash the price as much as they want, but they would be unable to sell through retailers.
It could be argued that the dead tree product is different from the downloaded version, but I doubt a judge would see it that way. Especially since the game makers have argued for so long that you are licensing content, not buying media.
As many others have noted, the datasets are often several years old. I was interested in using this service to check out new construction areas since I'm looking to buy a new home. Unfortunately, these areas didn't even have roads a few years back, so the google images don't remotely resemble current reality.
When you print out a map, it doesn't fill the page the way it adjusts to fills your screen.
There's NO SCALE!!! Holy Shite, what kind of map doesn't indicate the scale somewhere?
You can't (easily) save the images as gif/jpg.
The sattelite maps are commonly misaligned by 50-100 feet.
It's insanely impressive for a new beta product though. They've already replaced mapquest as my favorite directions/maps site.
Allow me to make a small comparison to a more appropriate profession (rather than actors): comedians. Even with a good manager, most decent comedians travel all over and rarely clear more than 50k in a good year. Great comedians will pack the house and make a few million per year. Jeff Foxworthy has managed very broad appeal and cleared tens of millions. Does this mean that you should turn in your bar card or MD to get the phat pay? Hell no. Most comedians barely make enough to keep the rent paid on their trailer home and the fridge stocked with beer. If comedy had solid $50k+ entry level positions, everybody would do it. It's not P2P that killed it either. It's just that if acting, singing or joking paid any more, everyone would want to do it.
Almost anyone wants to be a successful performer (star). Unfortunately the unsuccessful ones usually refuse to accept it and move on. I've checked out the websites of tons of groups that bitch about not being able to get contracts or gigs, or they claim people won't pay for their CDs because of P2P, but ever one of them has sucked. A few had great sound, but their singer was tone deaf. Or the occasional cool lead, but the guy on keyboards couldn't keep a beat. Many ruined their audio by apparently putting a pillow over their microphones. I wouldn't be surprised if they were ugly or geeky looking too. I'm sure they've all been rejected hundreds of times, but they won't accept that they suck until they're dead broke and begging their parents for money to supplement their income from McDonalds.
actors..they make large amounts of money..and may of them are un-educated
Perhaps my impressions are wrong, but I always thought that most actors over 22 have not only graduated high school, but also college or an acting school. The SAG mandates that underage actors are required to spend about 5 hours a day with a teacher while on projects. OTOH, musicians tend to drop out of high school to start a band, and almost never go on to college. However, like musicians, most actors make nothing. L.A. is brimming over with aspiring actors waiting tables. Most who do work are only working a few months of the year. There are tons of small play houses across the US with 20-30 actors making either nothing (they do it because they enjoy performing) or just enough that their 14 hour acting days just barely make up for their regular 8 hour days as say, a substitute teacher.
There is not, and has never been, any real money in the performing arts. You may think that you deserve the mad Britney Spears money, but the only person who deserves cash for that is the guy with the magic wand who fished her out of the trailer park and made her popular. You probably suck. You couldn't hit the top 1000 spot on the charts. You definately couldn't hit the break even 100 spot. Go to college and become and engineer or a doctor like your momma told you to. Then, if you still miss music, go find a karaoke bar. Join the church choir. Sing at your friend's wedding. You've got a fun hobby, now get a job.
Don't you already know that RIAA musicians don't make money from their CD sales? Yes, they get a contract that fronts (loans) them $100-200k for expenses to record it, but then they get sent to the RIAA's own recording studio that charges $10k/day to record the songs. Then they bill the artist for advertising. Then they mail out thousands of copies of the CD to promote it and bill the artist for the wholesale price. If you get big enough to warrant a music video, they pay for it and charge it to your account. The only way you keep any money is if your album goes multi platinum, or if your studio costs are less than what you get fronted AND you never make another album.
The only way you'll make money is in touring. Even then, the venue eats alot of the profits. Either they take half of ticket sales, or they get all the merchandising.
Most musicians should count themselves very lucky if they can ever clear 6 figures per year. Hell, if I had no college (or even high school in a lot of cases) degree and spent years playing my guitar in my mom's garage, I'd thank god just to be able to make 30k a year. It pains me the way that drummers and guitar players think they deserve to make as much as the CEO of a small, but highly successful company. If uneducated musicians consistently made good money, then everyone would be a musician. Even doped-up, STD-riddled, ugly-ass musicians get laid. They should be paid well too?!?
Naw, they were pricing it there at their regular $19.99. I double checked walmart.com later and it was still listed at the sale price. Having never lived in any area with less than 150k people in the immediate area, I never understood why small town folks hate walmart so much. I now know the full extent of how far they go to drive existing businesses under and then jack up prices over what people probably paid before. Walmart could be a model for efficient one-stop (and self checkout!) shopping, but their monopolistic price gouging strategies are vile.